Farm bill ready for conference committee

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06/29/2018 10:00 AM EDT

Presented by the National Confectioners Association

With Liz Crampton and Alexander Nieves

ALL EYES TO CONFERENCE AFTER SENATE FARM BILL PASSES: The Senate’s easy passage of the farm bill Thursday gives Ag Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and ranking member Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) momentum heading into conference negotiations. The pair, a united front throughout the process, acknowledged as much following the 86-11 vote. “I think the strong vote is very helpful to us and it is not true that I was using tasers on who was going to vote ‘no,’” Roberts joked, standing alongside Stabenow as they spoke with reporters outside the Senate floor.

Power couple: Throughout the week, the duo wrangled competing requests from senators angling to get their individual proposals attached to the sweeping farm and nutrition policy legislation. Most significantly, they joined forces to defeat an amendment that would have put in place stricter work requirements on some food stamp recipients than those in the House version. The proposal from Sens. John Kennedy (R-La.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) would have expanded work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents, as well would have required recipients to show photo I.D. when purchasing groceries using benefits.

SNAP showdown: Although that amendment went down, reconciling different approaches to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program promises to be the biggest challenge facing the conference committee. The House bill would strengthen work requirements on between 5 million and 7 million SNAP recipients — a slice of Speaker Paul Ryan’s welfare reform agenda that led to unanimous Democratic opposition when the bill passed last week. Roberts and Stabenow were careful to avoid that hot-button issue, with both leaders saying repeatedly that the House’s SNAP proposals would never clear the 60-vote threshold in the upper chamber.

But Roberts suggested that the Senate bill’s administrative changes combating fraud in food stamps, among other tweaks to how the program is carried out, have been overshadowed by the SNAP changes in the House bill. He admitted that he should have communicated his ideas more clearly to fellow Republicans. “If you look at what we did, without the backdrop of what the House did, it is terribly significant and is right on the money of getting integrity into the program,” he said. “I needed to really talk about that more to my Republican colleagues and, who knows, we could have hit 90 [votes].”

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LAST-MINUTE FARM BILL CHANGES: The Senate passed a series of amendments to the bill, mostly in the form of two manager’s packages that featured changes ranging from providing new protections for pollinators to increasing funding for the milk donation program.

Durbin backs off crop insurance amendment: Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) retreated from his push for a proposal reforming crop insurance. Stabenow said Durbin was satisfied with additional language bolstering rural emergency medical services. “He made the decision that he wasn't going to push on the crop insurance amendment, given other things that he cared deeply about that we were able to address,” she said.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) was successful in negotiating a change to Sen. Heidi Heitkamp’s amendment that would allow USDA funding for foreign market development programs to be spent in Cuba. After Rubio threatened to block any new amendments to the bill unless the North Dakota Democrat’s amendment was struck, the language of her provision was changed to clarify that federal funds can’t be spent at businesses owned by the Cuban military. Stabenow said the Cuba dispute took up most of the negotiating time on Wednesday and Thursday, and at one point talks were held among five senators’ offices simultaneously.

PORK GETS HIT FROM ALL SIDES: The pork industry is seeing some of the highest inventory of hogs and pigs since the USDA started recording data in 1964, according to the Quarterly Hogs and Pigs report released Thursday. On a call with reporters, the Pork Checkoff’s experts seemed to struggle to find a bright side for hog producers in the months to come. “We’re looking at an awful lot of hogs and an awful lot of pork,” said Dr. Ron Plain, a professor at University of Missouri in Columbia. “We’re going to look at a considerable number of months with red ink going forward.”

It’s been worse: Joe Kerns, president of Ames, Iowa-based consulting firm Kerns and Associates, noted that things are still better than they were two decades ago. “This is a prolonged downturn, but not a sharp ‘v’ bottom in the market that we saw in 1998,” he told reporters.

An industry already besieged: But as Pro’s Alexander Nieves has reported, pork has been hard hit by trade tensions, starting with President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Trans Pacific Partnership and continuing with retaliatory tariffs from Mexico and China. “You certainly don’t want to lose those markets at a time like this when we have record pork supplies and prices under real pressure,” Plain added.

Unclear what help lies ahead: Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told CNBC on Thursday that Trump will not force farmers to suffer from the ongoing trade battles. “The president has told me to tell [farmers] that he's not going to allow them to bear the brunt of these trade disruptions and to make a plan for mitigation unless we are unable resolve the trade issue,” he said. But when pressed for specifics about timing or how the government would help farmers, Perdue declined to comment.

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USDA RELEASES SNAP ERROR RATE DATA: After two years without releasing SNAP error rate data amid questions about its accuracy, USDA officials on Thursday provided figures showing a benefit payment error rate of 6.4 percent in fiscal year 2017, most of that due to overpayments. That’s nearly double the 3.66 percent error rate that was last reported in 2014. But USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, which administers SNAP on the federal level, attributed the dramatic difference largely to the fact that the agency has implemented new procedures to improve its accounting. Pro’s Alexander Nieves has more.

Recent improvements: In 2015, the USDA Office of Inspector General issued a report that found FNS' quality control was weak and its process for determining SNAP's national error rate was vulnerable to state abuse. The report also found states were taking steps to reduce error rates by using private consultants or internal committees to eliminate errors, rather than reporting them to the USDA. After that report was released, FNS worked with more than three dozen states to improve programs.

States blamed: Lawmakers have long had to walk a fine line between criticizing the program and making sure that SNAP benefits are being delivered to those that need them. At a September meeting, Senate Agriculture Committee members stressed that they blamed states administering SNAP and not the recipients for faulty error rates.

HOW TO AVOID SUPERBUGGED MARKET MEAT: It’s not the most palatable data to chew over — especially as many MA readers plan their July Fourth barbecue menus. But more than three quarters of the meat sold in supermarkets contains antibiotic-resistant superbugs, a newly released Environmental Working Group report shows.

Just how many bugs? EWG found that in the past five years since it originally started studying the government data, more pork chops and ground beef are contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria while ground turkey and chicken breasts are only slightly less contaminated. “I’m very concerned and consumers should be very concerned,” said Dawn Undurraga, a nutritionist and registered dietitian who worked on the study.

What consumers can do: EWG provided a tip sheet that advises consumers to seek out labels like “American Grassfed” or “USDA Organic” and avoid labels with statements like “No antibiotic residues.” It also directs consumers to its meat and dairy decoder that explains what it means when a label references the “American Grassfed Association” or “Animal Welfare Approved.”

ROW CROPS:

— Killer lettuce outbreak traced to canal water: The E. coli outbreak that killed five people who ate romaine lettuce grown in the Yuma, Ariz., region was traced to canal water in the area, the FDA announced today. Pro’s Alexander Nieves reports that the agency is continuing to investigate how the strain entered the water. It also officially declared the outbreak to be over.

— Nestlé pledges better chicken welfare standards across Europe: The world’s largest food company said it would work with its suppliers from a number of brands to reduce the density of chickens per square meter in broiler farms and switch to breeds that cope better with factory-farming conditions, among other things, by 2026, POLITICO’s Emmet Livingstone reports.

— Did you wash your hands? USDA bets you probably didn’t. A newly released study shows that people fail to properly wash their hands 97 percent of the time, thereby causing cross contamination.

— Mid-sized and larger farms benefit from tax reforms: A newly released study by USDA’s Economic Research Service calculates that small farms, which make up 91 percent of the market, would have experienced a decrease of 3 percentage points in their effective income tax rate had the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which passed in December 2017, been in effect in 2016. That’s less than other categories.

— A settlement with Trader Joe’s: The Animal Legal Defense Fund announced a settlement in its consumer protection case against Trader Joe’s Company. The lawsuit argued the market violated California consumer protection laws by selling cage-free eggs in cartons with images that don’t really show the conditions in which egg-laying hens are confined. The group said Trader Joe’s agreed to stop using the the misleading packaging.

— GMO labeling helps GMOs: Two years after Vermont’s law went into effect requiring disclosure when products are genetically modified, The Atlantic reports these products are selling as well as ever.

— Hoping the trade war is a hiccup: The Guardian visited with Iowa soybean farmers most affected by China’s retaliatory tactics in the ongoing trade war.

— Chobani cleans up its books: The New York Times reports that the yogurt maker is parting ways with the private equity investor it partnered with four years ago and instead is joining forces with a Canadian pension plan, giving it more control over its destiny.

— Cocaine and glyphosate: Colombia this week said that it would spray its vast coca plantations with glyphosate in order to destroy the crop, according to AFP.